Windows on the World

As her daughter Marina, and grand-daughter Ada look on, 90 year old grandma Eka fixes a ribbon onto the wishing tree.

Apparently she only started acting in films when she was 85. She carries the film on her humpy little back like a trooper. Does the kind of acting that doesn’t seem like acting at all. But like she’s living her life on screen in the way she lives it off it. Being no other self than her self, as authentically given.

And she’s got an indomitable presence which is slightly unnerving for being so still and frankly observant. As if a warthog were peering over at you with very watchful eyes.

(She wore plum coloured nail varnish on her stumpy little fingers that made me wonder, why? The application of vain decorative touches to the hard hoofs of an animal. In a very old womens mind. And what it might be thinking about. Scary.)

Altho some reviews are making out the film depicts Tbilisi as energy stricken and run down – I’d go there like a shot if you offered me a ticket. Especially if i got to live in the ramshackle clatter of colour apartment these 3 women were living in. (Only for a couple of weeks tho)

You get a real sense of family intimacy between them. Grandma gets her feet massaged and read Proust to by Ada. Then – when in hospital recovering from a heart tremor – Marina is at the end of the bed tickling her mothers feet; the affection of that moment comes spontaneously out of nowhere predictable. It doesn’t seem plotted for, simply happened by itself, they did it cus they wanted to, for no reason at all – like in life.

It’ll probably be worth watching this film again in a year or two. See if its quiet subtlety could sift even more poignancy in.

Dir: Julie Bertuccelli, Georgia/France

7.5/10

Not a bad film. Better than I expected. But not as good as all the Oscar hype would have you believe.

I couldn’t hear about half of the dialogue. Heath Ledger grunts and mumbles thro tightly shut lips. Fair enough, he’s trying to be a tightly shut-lipped kind of guy.

A kind of guy. And a kind of gay. And finding it hard to get the gay out the guy. Doesn’t wish to overtly express but can’t eradicate either – this “natural” kink of his manliness.

The first 40 or so minutes are the best part of the film. Up there on their Brokeback Mountain with only one another for company. Two lonely cowboys together. Or more accurate to say “sheepboys” (they’re riding around tending sheep)

I suppose after a while you can get a bit desperate. I started to understand how sheep-shagging might happen.

But they don’t shag their sheep. They shag one another. Like animals. Heath Ledger like a bucking bronco mounting ontop of something with an arsehole. Jake Gyllenhaal has the arsehole. And it’s available.

It’s not gay porn tho. It’s not at all erotic. They grapple one another, rough and tumble wrestle, tomfool together. There’s a minimum amount of kissing and affectionate touching.

I can’t say i really got their relationship like it was a love affair – until perhaps, right at the end (in retrospect, as a kind of hindsight). Neither of them seemed capable of “love” – either with one another, or with their wifes.

The sadness was in how cut off and estranged from an expressive and vibrant loving soul life these 2 “blokes” were. A couple of yer typical blokes caught up together in a very atypical relationship.

A feeling of regret leftover at the end. They missed out, didn’t follow through. Didn’t get what they wanted.

A film about 2 life’s lived – at heart – essentially unfulfilled. And that’s saddening.

Irrespective of what kind of man (or woman) you are.

Dir: Ang Lee, USA

7/10

Glumly droll i think you would call those faces. Not likely to be enjoying life that much.

Neither would you if you worked in a broken down sock factory in downtown Montevideo, Uruguay.

And Mr Kohler (thats him on the right) was your boss. It’s 7.25 a.m and you’re waiting for him outside the garage doors of the factory if you’re Marta (that’s her in the pic) He yanks them up, flips on the whirring machines, flicks on the fluorescent lights, pulls on the broken blinds. Marta brings him his morning tea. They hardly speak. He’s tapping with one finger on his ancient typewriter. She has a solitary fag. The 2 girl sock operatives clock off and have their bags checked (to see if they’re pinching socks. Pinching socks?!) The garage doors are yanked down. Marta is on the bus. Mr Kohler is spluttering off in his old tin can of a car. A day much like any other. A sock making sort of day. Glum almost turning into grim but saved by droll and flat batted about as deadpan.

They have the same day again tomorrow. And the same day the day after. Jacobo (Kohler) is yanking, flipping and flicking, pulling and tapping. Marta is monotonously attending to machines spinning out their socks, smoking her solitary fag. The girl sock operatives want the transistor radio on. Much talking is not going on. Making socks isn’t a lot of fun.

You might be able to tell i like this film by how much detail I’m telling.

Brother Herman from Brazil arrives. There’s an exchange of socks as gifts. Jacobo has asked Marta to pretend to be his wife. They sit around, and wiry livewire Herman is trying to light some spark of life back in to them. Jacobo sits there doing his usual gruff and glum, almost misanthropic. Marta – out of politeness – makes conventional responses, conforming to the good little wife act she’s doing.

Slowly she starts livening up;her spark is being lit. But the warmer she becomes with Herman, the colder Jacobo becomes with both of them.

In the 2nd half of the film Herman has invited them to the seaside. Marta is stirring out of her shy little shell. Herman says more and more. Jacobo says less and less. Nearly every scene seems to have a sad-funny intent, to draw out the pathos of each character.

In the interviews on the Dvd it becomes apparent how much of themselves each of these 3 actors have sacrificed to shrink-wrap themselves into their on screen persona’s. The actress that plays Marta is barely recognizable; her lively personality has been dulled and dumbed down, deliberately flattened flat of effect or energy.

Maybe it’s a bit overdone – this flattening. The reduction done to emphasize how repressed Marta (and Jacobo) are, how small their little sock making life is. They’re not loving their life’s, merely living them – with stoic indifference. But there’s something willed and deliberately contrived about how remorselessly unemotionally unexpressed they’re being. Marta could have been slightly less downtrodden, Jacobo slightly more upbeat – which could have added even more pathos to how sad the smallness is they’ve settled for, resigned themselves to.

But i like the film. It charmed me mostly. It’s brave not to go for upping the tensions into melodramatic cliches, and resolutions that are all too obvious and easy.

The ending is left open-ended. Jacobo is back making his socks. But where’s Marta? You’re left wondering. And you care enough to want to wonder about whether she’ll come back – or whether she’s gone for good.

Dir’s: Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll, Uruguay

Juan Pablo Rebella sadly shot himself thro the head in 2006. Read this Obit here

8.5/10

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. With a name like that you’ve got to be a “Somebody” with your life. Be a 19th century Count. Be a film director.

From the interview with him on the Dvd he’s a top bloke.

East Berlin in 1984, all grimly drab and drably gray. I was there – it was, how it is in this film. You couldn’t get a decent sausage anywhere (actually i did get one – freezing my nuts off at an Imbiss near Friedrichstrasse)

Ulrich Muhe as the Stasi clone is also top; you warm to how warm he becomes, how his heart turns human. How he can’t stop himself from falling in love – with his own humanity.

It’s been nominated for, and won, loads of awards. I’ve already seen it in a 100 Greatest Films list. It thinks of itself as a “great” film (if the interviews on the extras are anything to go by)

It was not great for me. I’m finding it a bit difficult to praise it too much. Something slightly too slick about it, the drabness slightly too polished.

And yet again – and this is becoming a real bugbear of mine – the orchestral soundtrack is conspicuously pulling on your heartstrings, elevating the feelings it thinks you should be having into inflatable sentimentality.

Overall tho, it’s commendable. You’ll feel suitably “entertained”, and suitably seriously enlightened about the weavilly Stasi.

You could comfortably watch with others “The Lives of Others”.

Dir: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Germany

Ulrich Muhe died last year, only 54.

7.5/10